Almost 1 in 5 websites now blocked by censorship filters in the UK

Browse the web in the UK, and sooner or later there’s a good chance you’ll stumble across a website that’s been blocked. Sites like The Pirate Bay, Fenopy and H33t are no longer viewable due to court orders preventing access, and other sites -- many perfectly legitimate -- are being blocked by censorship filters.

It’s not quite as bad as living in China, but according to a new project by the Open Rights Group, ISPs are currently blocking 19 percent of tested websites.

The Blocked project is an online tool that lets you check whether a website is being censored by filters. So far it has checked over 105,000 websites, and disturbingly found over 20,000 which have been blocked by one or more ISPs.

One in Five Websites Blocked in the UK

One in five websites are being blocked in the UK by Internet service providers in an attempt to protect children from mature content, according to a study by the Open Rights Group. However, over-blocking is affecting businesses, bloggers and regular web users.

The Open Rights Group created a free tool that lets anyone check if a specific web site is being blocked by an ISP filter.

“Through the Blocked project, we wanted to find out about the impact of Web filters,” Executive Director of Open Rights Group Jim Killock said. “Already, our reports are showing that almost 1 in 5 websites tested are blocked and that the problem of over-blocking seems much bigger than we thought.”